When Two Worlds Don’t Collide: Can Social Curation Address the Marginalisation of Open Educational Practices and Resources from Outside Academia?

Authors:

Leigh-Anne Perryman,

The Open University, GB

About Leigh-Anne

Tony Coughlan

The Open University, GB

About Tony

Abstract

A canyonesque gulf has long existed between open academia and many external subject communities. Since 2011, we have been developing and piloting the public open scholar role (Coughlan and Perryman 2012) - involving open academics discovering, sharing and discussing open educational resources (OER) with online communities outside formal education in order to help bridge this gulf. In 2013 we took the public open scholar into Facebook (Perryman and Coughlan, 2013) to reach an international audience of autism-focussed Facebook groups in India, Africa and Malaysia, with a combined membership of over 5000 people.

Performing the public open scholar role within Facebook led to our learning from group members about new resources produced by subject communities outside formal education, for example by voluntary sector organisations, government and professional bodies. These resources are surprisingly numerous and compare favourably with those from universities. Seeking to source more such resources we conducted a systematic large-scale search of free online courses, recording not only the number of learning materials available, but also how easy it was to find them.

We found that provision from formal education, especially universities, dominates the returned results when searching for free online courses. Consequently, resources from beyond formal education, while they exist, are difficult to find. Indeed, most aggregators and repositories proudly state that the free online courses they list are from 'Top Universities', appearing oblivious to provision from external subject communities. We extended our research to cover e-textbooks and found a similar situation, with content from formal education again dominating provision.

On the basis of these findings we suggest that the prominence of university-provided content within search aggregators not only marginalises externally produced resources, relegating them to even more obscurity than has been the case thus far, but also marginalises the open educational practices that were involved in the production of these resources. We propose that the OER movement’s questions about ways of involving end-users as co-producers may be answered by looking to external subject communities and, accordingly, we should be supporting and learning from these communities. In addition, there is a need for further research into the open educational practices of external subject communities, who are clearly more than just passive consumers of resources and are involved in both producing and adapting OER.

Our research has also led to our further developing the public open scholar role to include online content curation as a part of the process, on the basis of evidence indicating that online curation has the potential to help increase the discoverability of resources and raise awareness of open educational practices from beyond academia. In particular, we suggest that ‘social curation’ (Seitzinger, 2014) - which foregrounds sharing curated collections as a component of the curation process - has a key role in this regard. We also suggest that further research in this area could be beneficial, for example in exploring the potential for librarians to become involved in curating OER from outside academia.

How to Cite:
Perryman, L.-A. and Coughlan, T., 2014. When Two Worlds Don’t Collide: Can Social Curation Address the Marginalisation of Open Educational Practices and Resources from Outside Academia?. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2014(2), p.Art. 3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.ab

Introduction

The open education and open educational resources (OER) movements remain almost
inseparable from the higher education institutions from which they emerged and
little attention is given to the wealth of OER that are being produced by subject
communities outside higher education, for example professional and regulatory
bodies. The 2013 report by the Hewlett Foundation (The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2013) touches upon the massive
potential for OER use and production beyond higher (and formal) education when
stating that:

‘By enabling virtually anyone to tap into, translate and tailor educational
materials previously reserved only for students at elite universities, OER has
the potential to jump start careers and economic development in communities that
lag behind. Millions worldwide have already opened this educational lockbox, but
if OER is going to democratize learning and transform the classroom and
teaching, then it must move from the periphery of education practice to centre
stage.’ (The Hewlett Foundation, 2013, p.
4)

Subject communities outside academia could very well be the key to this
‘lockbox’ for many people and moving to ‘centre stage’ will
involve paying attention to open educational resources and practices from beyond
formal education. Relevantly, the UK-based OER4Adults report by Falconer et
al (2013, p. 4) recommended that
the OER movement should ‘recognise that ‘learning’ takes place
everywhere’ and should ‘extend the range of people and organisations who
produce and use resources’ and ‘encourage OER development by
organisations and communities outside mainstream education’ (p. 46). The
authors explain:

‘An assumption we often encountered is that universities are best placed to
produce quality OER. However, during our study we sourced excellent examples of
different types of organisations producing OER specifically for lifelong
learners - sometimes in partnership with professional educators, but often in
fields not normally touched by mainstream education. These organisations
included private sector companies, public sector institutions, professional
bodies and third sector organisations (e.g. Social Care Institute for
Excellence, OpenScout, C4EO). All types of organisations should be encouraged to
consider their contributions to learning, triggering a re-evaluation of
inter-relationships.’ (Falconer et
al, 2013, p. 46)

Since 2011, we have been working with subject communities outside formal education
when developing and piloting a new role for open academics, which we have named
‘the public open scholar’ (Coughlan and
Perryman, 2012). The role involves open academics working with online
communities outside formal education who might benefit from OER, identifying
members’ expressed needs and then sourcing OER to meet those needs (see Figure
1). As such, the role is an extension of
Weller’s ‘digital scholar’ - ‘someone who employs digital,
networked and open approaches to demonstrate specialism in a field’ (Weller, 2011, Chapter 1). We have developed
this role, with the aim of increasing awareness of open educational resources and
disseminating information about the resource needs of people outside the academy.
The public open scholar role was piloted in 2011 within UK voluntary sector online
welfare communities who were using bulletin board-style forums for information
sharing and peer support (see Coughlan and Perryman,
2012) and in 2013 we took the public open scholar into Facebook (Perryman and Coughlan, 2013) to reach an
international audience of autism-focused Facebook groups in India, Africa and
Malaysia, with a combined membership of over 5000 people.

Figure 1

The public open scholar role.

A wealth of resources from external subject communities

Whilst performing the public open scholar role within Facebook we began learning
from Facebook group members about new resources that had been produced outside
formal education, for example by voluntary sector organisations, government and
professional bodies. Table 1 shows a
selection of free Autism-related online resources produced outside formal
education, some of which are openly licensed and Table 2 shows a selection of free Autism-related e-textbooks,
again some of which are openly licensed.

324 pages. Outlines an interdisciplinary approach to
education for children with autism.

Our paper is grounded in our work within the OER movement, which sees OER as
being both free to use and openly licensed in such a way that allows re-use and
adaptation (The William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, 2013). However, we have included in the above tables
resources that are free to use, but which are not openly licensed. Our decision
is informed by recent research by the OER Research Hub (2013) indicating that ‘while many educators state that
open licensing is important, this does not always transfer into their own
practice’ and that ‘for learners the presence of an open licence is
not seen as important’. For the current study, the distinction between
open and non-open licensing is less of an issue than the matter of whether
resources and practices from beyond the academy are being marginalised.

While examining such resources in depth during our public open scholar work it
became apparent that free online resources from outside formal education are
surprisingly numerous, for example the 4000 free textbooks from The National
Academies Press (http://www.nap.edu), and compare favourably with those from
universities in being pedagogically sound, properly referenced, well-supported
with evidence and up-to-date. In addition, the status of the authors of such
resources tends to be clear (for example, their qualifications are given,
showing their authority and the provenance of the resources). The Good and Bad
Science of Autism (http://www.autismwestmidlands.org.uk/content/930593/understanding_autism/understanding_autism/our_publications)
is a notable example. Written by geneticist Dr. Neil Walsh and neuroscientist
Dr. Elisabeth Hurley, the 94-page book brings together scientific research from
multiple disciplines including neuroscience, genetics and psychology. They are
writing from within the context of an autism charity and they interpret the
science to make it accessible. In addition, the examples are very relevant to
charity members.

Methods

Seeking to source more high quality resources from outside formal education, and
motivated by Falconer et al.’s OER4Adults report (Falconer et al., 2013), we
conducted a systematic large scale search, recording not only the number of learning
materials available but also how easy it was to find them. We began by identifying
target personae as a means of shaping our search strategies. Our search was based
around two typical personae: (1) the parent/carer of a child who they suspect may
have autism, or who has been recently diagnosed; (2) teachers and support workers
seeking to meet the needs of autistic children in their classes or groups. We
decided to search for courses as the complexity of autism cannot easily be reduced
into a single book.

With the two personae in mind we began by keeping the search as broad as possible,
using the search term ‘online autism course’ and Google.co.uk. We chose
Google for its popularity, and accepted the default Google.co.uk version for UK
users. We then varied the search to include the variations ‘online ASD
course’, ‘online autism training’ and ‘free online autism
course’. Finally, we compared the Google search results for ‘online
autism course’ with results returned using the search engine Bing. Mindful of
the impact of cookies on Google search results, we cleared all cookies and the
browser cache before conducting the search and between each episode of
searching.

Once the results were returned we closely examined the top 50 results for each search
and allocated each result to one of the following categories:

Courses from universities (subdivided into fee-paying and free for the
free online autism courses search);

Courses from colleges and private training companies (subdivided into
fee-paying and free for the free online autism courses
search)

Lists and aggregator sites

Courses restricted to members or a particular location

Open and/or free courses from outside formal education

Erroneous results, e.g. free newsletters.

We then looked at the balance between formal education and external subject
communities.

Results

The results of our search are provided in Table 3 and represented in Figure 2.

Table 3

Search results for autism related online courses.

Search term and search engine
used

Universities

Colleges & private training
companies

Lists & aggregator
sites

Courses restricted to members or a
particular location

Free/open courses from outside formal
education

Erroneous results

online autism course - Google UK

16

13

10

8

2

1

online ASD course - Google UK

15

11

9

5

3

7

online autism training - Google UK

5

12

12

12

5

6

online autism course - Bing

9

20

11

4

1

5

free online autism course - Google UK

8

7

9

15

3

8

Total

53

63

51

44

14

27

Figure 2

Search results for autism related online courses.

It was clear from the results that the numerous autism courses from outside formal
education (nearly 100 are listed in Table 1)
are hard to find, irrespective of the search term or search engine used. Aggregators
and lists fetching, filtering and organising information about courses from multiple
online sources represented a high proportion of the search results and we felt it
reasonable to assume that our imagined personae would investigate what they had to
offer. We therefore conducted a search of the results delivered by aggregators.
Table 4 shows the six most frequently
appearing aggregators and lists and gives a breakdown of the online autism courses
offered through them.

Here too, we found that formal education provision dominates the returned results, to
the total exclusion of provision from elsewhere. Indeed, most aggregators and
repositories proudly state that the free online courses they list are from
‘top’ or ‘well-known’ universities’, appearing
oblivious to provision from outside formal education, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Screenshot of the OpenCulture header.

Discussion

Our research results clearly indicated that resources from external subject
communities were difficult to find and, accordingly, not only were the resources
themselves being marginalised but also the open educational practices involved in
their creation. In exploring the implications of this, we began to consider the
potential of online content curation as a means of improving the discoverability of
resources from beyond academia.

Discoverability problems

The prominence of formal education provision within the results returned by both
search engines and aggregators has several implications. An obvious implication
is that resources produced outside formal education are being marginalised,
rendered very difficult to find, especially by people who lack Web search
experience. As a consequence, learners are prevented from benefiting from a
wealth of high quality resources that may be more relevant to their needs than
those produced within formal education. Indeed, Falconer et al (2013, p.3) assert that ‘approaches
that work well in a university context may be less appropriate elsewhere‘
adding that ‘transferring resources produced in one community such as a
university to another such as a group of workplace learners can be
difficult’ (p. 4).

The discoverability problems encountered during our research could be
attributable to multiple factors, both active and passive. For example,
resource-producers’ may employ disparate marketing approaches and
universities may be particularly skilled at marketing and syndicating their
content. (It is worth noting that one course from Yale appears repeatedly in the
results from both search engines and aggregators, with results returned for the
course’s appearance in Yale’s own website, in iTunes and in YouTube.
In contrast, the 43 autism modules from the external body the Ohio Center for
Autism and Low Incidence (http://www.ocali.org) rarely appeared in the search results and
when they did, they appeared as a single entry.) In addition, the visibility of
a resource can be influenced by whether web crawlers can only see metadata, a
provided index or the full ‘text’, and whether that data and text
includes popular search terms. Paid-for advertising can also raise the search
engine profile of specific results as can the number of sites that refer to a
particular web page (with larger sites gaining more referrals and a higher
profile). In this regard the aggregators, which only link to university sites,
further exacerbate the problem.

Our findings indicate a need for an impartial open content search facility
presenting resources from within and outside formal education in order to help
discoverability of the latter. The Solvonauts open content search engine
(http://solvonauts.org) and the
OpenScout open management content search facility (http://learn.openscout.net/) are both very much a step in the
right direction.

Marginalisation of open educational practices

Falconer et al (2013, p. 4) state that it is
important to ‘think of OER more broadly than as content’. Accordingly, a
further implication of the marginalisation of resources produced beyond formal
education is that this, in turn, marginalises the open educational practices that
are involved in the production of these resources. For example, an electronic
textbook on child and adolescent mental health is freely downloadable on the website
of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied
Professions (http://iacapap.org), a non-governmental professional organization
that serves as an umbrella for child and adolescent mental health associations and
societies throughout the world. The book’s 42 chapters were written
collaboratively by over 90 international experts, particularly for the benefit of
professionals who would otherwise not be able to purchase a printed textbook.
IACAPAP are committed to updating the book annually and actively invite feedback
from users on any alterations or improvements needed. They are particularly
sensitive to issues of cultural and ethnic variations and interpretations and are
keen to offer resources in other than English in future. The book is released with a
CC-BY-NC licence. Notably, the IACAPAP textbook did not appear in our Google search
results.

The OER movement has increasingly emphasised the need to move beyond top-down content
production to consider ways of involving end-users as co-producers and our findings
suggest that much can be learned by looking at the practices of (and supporting)
external communities such as IACAPAP. Falconer et al (2013, p. 46) recommend that collaborative relationships should be
developed between universities and organisations in other sectors, reporting
that:

‘We identified numerous potential benefits of collaboration of HE
institutions with public, private and third sector organisations to produce OER.
These benefits include: an increase in the number and range of resources
available for adults and lifelong learners; development of resources that can
improve the employability of registered students in HE institutions; useful
links and networks for learners involved with their potential future sectors;
improved understanding of academic and industry/sector needs which can impact on
curriculum development to reflect better sector requirements; new business
models for the production of OER.’

Working with external communities could also help academics to be relevant in their
work, to be better informed and to be more up-to-date about topical issues in their
subject area. As a result they would be better able to respond to the real
identified needs of external subject communities. However, should the open
educational practices of communities outside formal education be marginalised by the
dominance of practices and resources from within formal education the potential for
constructive, mutually beneficial collaboration may be compromised.

The potential of online content curation

In the course of our research into the discoverability of resources from outside
academia we began to realise the importance of an open educational practice that is
used both within and outside the academy: digital curation using sites such as
Pinterest and Scoopit. Bijsterveld (2013, p.
44) acknowledges the value of online content curation within the context
of formal education, noting that ‘It is difficult for students and instructors
to find the right content, which means that they are not maximising the potential of
OER’. Bijsterveld cites Masterman et al.’s (2011) assertion that ‘searching reveals
either too much about a subject – meaning that it is only checked
superficially – or too little that is of good quality’ (Bijsterveld, 2013, p. 44), adding that
up-to-date content curation around specific topics can help instructors and learners
to find relevant resources (see also Kanter,
2012, and Robertson, 2012). Kanter
(2012) points out that
‘interpretation is important’ when curating free online content, while
Robertson (2012) suggests that ‘the
information specialists at libraries can play an important role here, given that
libraries specialise in this kind of work’.

Two case studies illustrate how digital curation might help improve the
discoverability of open resources from outside the academy, while also providing a
useful comparison point with the search results reported earlier: Tony
Coughlan’s CYP-media project and Suzanne Schlechte’s Pinterest boards on
early childhood education.

Case study 1: CYP-media

CYP-media (see Figure 4) is a dynamic online
collection of free eLearning, textbooks and journals for the children and young
people’s (CYP) workforce - a sector comprising roles such as childminding,
nurseries, youth clubs, fostering and adoption, but with low-paid workers and
volunteers particularly in mind. It was developed and is curated by one of this
paper’s authors, Tony Coughlan, and has three complementary components - a
blog (cyp-media.org) plus two
communication channels: a Facebook page (fb.me/freeCYPmedia)
and a Twitter account (twitter.com/CYPmedia).

Figure 4

Screenshot of the CYP-media blog.

CYP-media was developed in response to a growing realisation that there were an
increasing number of multimedia resources scattered around the Internet, but
they could be hard to find, of unknown quality, and vague about whether they
might be pirated or copyright materials. The curator Tony Coughlan is well
qualified to make an assessment of these resources, firstly from being an
experienced tutor and e-learning author himself, and secondly from also being a
Chair and Director of a children’s charity.

The mostly-female children and young people’s workforce faces two major
hurdles to participating in education – firstly financial, with up to 20%
being unpaid volunteers, and secondly, childcare responsibilities, which can be
an obstacle to attending face-to-face sessions. The free e-learning promoted
through CYP-media responds to both these obstacles and offers learning
opportunities to many who might otherwise be excluded. An equally important
feature of this project is that it makes it easier for other educators to
incorporate free digital resources in their own teaching, confident about their
quality and any licensing conditions about their use.

On the CYP-media blog (which serves as the index), Tony writes a short review of
each permanent resource that is featured, including its source, academic level,
ease of use and approximately how long it takes to study. The resources listed
began with BBC podcasts and simple e-learning modules, but have expanded to
include Facebook subject groups, MOOCs, e-books, e-journals and a serious
computer game. The original publishers of the 70 items that Tony has listed so
far are shown in Table 5.

Table 5

Publishers of resources in CYP-media.

Publisher

Number of resources in
CYP-media

Charities, government and other
public-sector

35

Private sector

2

Universities

22

Aggregators

0

Media etc.

12

Given the widespread publicity about increased university fees, the target
audience of volunteers and low-paid workers are themselves unlikely to be
searching the websites of professional institutes and universities for free
resources, so the CYP-media blog posts are disseminated through the linked
Facebook page and Twitter account. Through these, the project is reaching
significant numbers of people; the CYP-media blog attracts an average of over
200 views per week, with a total of more than 14,000 views over its lifetime. In
addition, there are up to 2,000 views of the CYP-media Facebook page each week
and the CYP-media Twitter account has over 1,500 followers. The Facebook page in
particular is a good source of feedback on the resources, along with suggestions
for other resources to include in future. It was through the Facebook page that
Tony encountered another curator, Suzanne Schlechte, whose work is described
next.

Case study 2: Suzanne Schlechte’s Pinterest boards

The second case study features an independent curator from outside formal
education - Suzanne Schlechte. Suzanne is a child care provider in British
Columbia, Canada. She runs the My Buddies Daycare centre in Richmond BC, and has
20 years experience of working with children. Over the years, she has regularly
shared the ideas that have worked at My Buddies through her blog, Facebook, and
now Pinterest (www.pinterest.com/mybuddiesandi/early-childhood-education) (see
Figure 5). One of Suzanne’s Pinterest
boards focuses on Early Childhood Education and is described as “A growing
collection of resources, courses & training sites available free of
charge”.

Figure 5

Screenshot of Suzanne Schlechte’s Pinterest board on early
childhood education.

In June 2014, the board had attracted 700 followers, and featured 42 pins
(resources). The original source of these items is shown in Table 6.

Number of resources in Suzanne
Schlechte’s Early Childhood Education Pinterest
board

Charities, government and other
public-sector

11

Private sector

8

Universities

7

Aggregators

4

Media etc.

4

These are markedly different patterns from the results we found by using Google
searches. It is not possible to directly compare either Suzanne’s
Pinterest board or CYP-media with our Google search results as the subjects are
different; we were searching on autism, whereas Suzanne’s focus is early
childhood education. However, they are neighbouring topics, and the curation at
CYP-media covers both topics.

Suzanne explains that she became motivated to curate her collection of resources
after struggling to find learning materials herself:

Many years ago, before widespread Internet use, I set out to acquire some
knowledge in the field of early childhood education (ECE). I was already a
home child care provider and there were very few educational options
available to me that did not involve closing my business and attending
classes. This wasn’t a good choice for me and I ended up taking some
classes through a correspondence school. Years later, I was able to take
evening classes in E.C.E that built upon the knowledge I had already
acquired.

On another occasion, I was trying to help one of my daycare children with
their speech. It was so difficult to find the information I needed! I did
finally find one CD of instruction that I purchased to use. It amazed me
that more materials of that nature were not readily available. There is more
information out there now, as bloggers with speech pathology training have
taken to the internet.

It’s only been in the last year or so that a few classes have come
online for child care provider training and these are directly connected to
the government. (Food Safety and Child Care Seat Safety) Of course there are
some colleges that operate online, too, but it’s the short courses to
keep up to date on current info that are particularly hard to find
online.

Now today, it is my hope that anyone who has the desire to learn about
children has the opportunity to do so. The ECE pinboard I created has so
many good links to information and resources. I was excited at all the good
information that is out there! (Schlechte,
2014)

The value of social curation

CYP-Media and Suzanne Schlechte’s Pinterest collections share a common
feature beyond their content - the sharing practices that allow the resources in
these collections to be found easily by people who have pressing needs, but who
are not experts in Internet searching. In 2008 librarian and digital curator
Neil Beagrie ‘noticed a new phenomenon of users creating personal digital
collections and projected challenges ahead for individuals in organizing and
preserving information, but also in determining how they could share the
artefacts they collected effectively to an audience’ (Seitzinger, 2014, p. 412). Joyce Seitzinger
(2014) identifies sharing as a key
component of one type of online curation - ‘social curation’ - which
she suggests is a distinct practice from digital curation and content curation.
Seitzinger (2014, p. 415) explains that
the process of social curation ‘always has four phases: discovery,
selection, collection and sharing’ and is performed by an individual
‘for a social purpose such as learning, collaboration, identity expression
or community participation’.

Librarians as curators

While CYP-Media and Suzanne Schlechte’s Pinterest boards function as
informal, social curation, there is just as much scope to increase awareness of
resources and practices from beyond the academy through established information
management specialists such as librarians. In recent years librarians have seen
great changes in the scope of their role and in 2006 Dempsey predicted that ‘in the short term, the library
needs to begin…developing digital curation services’. Six years on
the Libraries Survey Report (Bueno-de-la-Fuente
et al., 2012) recommended more involvement of
librarians in content-focused OER initiatives. A year later the influential Surf
Report (Bijsterveld, 2013) assigned a new
role to libraries in higher education institutions that could be replicable
outside formal education, proposing that:

‘The task of the library at a higher education institution is to search
for and collect information for the staff and students. In order to carry
out that task, the library employs information specialists; these would make
excellent content curators for their particular discipline. Besides finding
the right articles about a particular topic, they can also find OER for that
topic, make them accessible, and add comments. After all, content curation
means more than merely collecting links. It is extremely important for the
information to be placed in a context.’ (Bijsterveld, 2013, p. 46)

Extending the public open scholar role

Returning to the public open scholar role - the original catalyst for our researching
the availability and discoverability of resources outside formal education - we feel
there is justification for further developing the role to include social curation.
Such curation was closely linked with the original conceptualisation of the public
open scholar role, though on a needs-led basis rather than the object-led basis that
typifies much online content curation, and involving communities of like-minded
people interacting with resources that had been shared with them within their own
environment, be it online forums (Coughlan and
Perryman, 2012) or Facebook groups (Perryman and Coughlan, 2013). Initially though curation was not an
essential component of the role.

However, the research findings reported in this paper highlight the usefulness of the
public open scholar curating and sharing one or more collections in connection with
the role, as this could help to increase the discoverability of resources from
outside formal education. A public open scholar would gather the content for their
collection(s) while performing step 4 of the role (see Figure 6), having listened to the needs of the communities with which
they are working (step 2). The curated collection would have a reach that extends
beyond the immediate context of the communities identified in step 1, helping to
overcome search problems for content produced outside formal education. The public
open scholar’s professional and academic credentials would enhance the
collections’ credibility. In addition, their interpretation and
contextualisation adds value to the resources, and their curating could serve as a
useful quality control filter.

Figure 6

The revised public open scholar role.

Conclusion

Our research offers clear evidence that free and open resources from outside academia
are being marginalised and are hard to find using conventional searching. In
addition, our study findings indicate the existence of very active subject
communities outside the academy whose open practices are not necessarily recognised
within academia and are also being marginalised. As such, our research adds weight
to the existing literature asserting the need for the open education and OER
movements to broaden their scope and to support, promote and, indeed, value resource
production, use and re-use by communities outside formal education. In outlining
open educational practices beyond the academy, and the differing needs of learners
within and outside formal education, our study also links with recent research into
the use of OER by informal learners (e.g. Law,
Perryman and Law, 2013; OER Research Hub,
2014). Additional research building on our study findings might usefully
investigate in more depth the open educational practices of external subject
communities, who are clearly more than just passive consumers of resources, being
involved in both producing and adapting OER to meet their own specific needs.

Our research has also led to our further developing the public open scholar role to
include social curation as a part of the process. This development has been informed
by our research findings indicating that online content curation has the potential
to help increase the discoverability of resources from beyond academia, and the
awareness of open educational practices of communities outside formal education,
especially when following a similar sharing-focused format to that shown in
CYP-Media and Suzanne Schlechte’s Pinterest boards. However, a brief overview
of digital curation suggests that online content curators more typically curate
articles and blog posts rather than resources and courses. Further research in this
area could therefore be beneficial, for example in exploring the potential for
librarians to become more involved in curating OER from outside academia.

Thus far the OER movement has failed to address the chasm between the two worlds of
academia and external subject communities. Our research has highlighted what can
happen when these two worlds don’t collide, and how social curation and the
recognition of open educational practices from beyond academia can benefit
academics, professionals, formal and informal learners alike.

Coughlan, T. and Perryman, L. (2012). Reaching out with OER: the new role of public-facing open scholar.
eLearning Papers, 31 article 31_1. Available from
http://oro.open.ac.uk/35934/. [Accessed 20 November
2013].

Perryman, L. and Coughlan, T. (2013). Using open educational resources in online welfare communities:
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Perryman L-A, Coughlan T. When Two Worlds Don’t Collide: Can Social Curation Address the Marginalisation of Open Educational Practices and Resources from Outside Academia?. Journal of Interactive Media in Education. 2014;2014(2):Art. 3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.ab